The opposition Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) would propose a revised special defense budget bill, TPP Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) said yesterday, following his return from meetings with US government officials in Washington.
Speaking at the TPP headquarters after returning to Taiwan yesterday morning, Huang said he met with US trade, defense and state department officials during a whirlwind visit to the US capital on Monday.
He did not mention the names of the US officials he met, and said that the American Institute in Taiwan asked him not to disclose the content of their meetings.
Photo: Tu Chien-jung, Taipei Times
The TPP delegation has expressed its reservations about the government’s proposed NT$1.25 trillion (US$39.52 billion) special defense budget, including the “lack of clarity” about how the money would be spent, Huang said.
Huang was referring to the special defense budget proposed by the Cabinet on Nov. 27 last year to fund weapons procurement and joint development programs with the US from this year to 2033.
A special budget is funding outside of the central government’s general budget (which already includes defense spending) that is financed by issuing debt.
Huang said he told US officials that the legislature of a democratic country like Taiwan could not accept reviewing a budget with unclear or unknown spending items, and that the US “understood and agreed with” his concerns.
A “relatively high proportion” of the proposed budget’s NT$1.25 trillion would not be allotted to US arms purchases, Huang said, without elaborating.
To date, the TPP and the main opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) have teamed up six times to block review of the bill in the legislature.
Asked by reporters if his position on the budget had changed after visiting the US, Huang said his opposition to the bill had in fact become stronger.
“Taiwan needs to strengthen its defense, but the budget can’t be wasted or treated like spoils in the eyes of arms dealers or middlemen,” he said.
The TPP would wait to hear a closed legislative committee briefing on the special budget next week by the Ministry of National Defense, after which it would propose its own version of the bill, Huang said.
Asked if the TPP budget would be smaller than the government’s and if it had received backing from the US, Huang said it did not require consent from the US, as Taiwan and the US each have their own respective positions.
As for the size of the TPP’s budget proposal, Huang said it was too early to say, as it would be based on information from the ministry’s report on the budget next week.
Meanwhile, the New York Times on Monday reported that the US and Taiwan are nearing a trade deal to reduce Taiwan’s tariff rate to 15 percent, which prompted speculation on whether Huang would discuss the tariff issue during his US trip.
Huang said the TPP delegation visited the Office of the US Trade Representative, but he only found out that negotiations regarding the tariff had basically been settled before his arrival.
“We were also quite shocked,” he said about when he realized that the terms had been decided.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS